Depeche Mode - Spirits in the Forest (2019)

'If there was a movie about them,' observed my friend Nick, 'they'd be running round the corner to escape the police in Basildon, and then be in a massive stadium with heroin addictions in the next frame.'

Surprisingly, there is a movie about them, and although Nick was off the mark where the plot is concerned, I nevertheless feel his comment expresses some deeper truth fairly well.

I recall Depeche Mode from way back, at least since they first started turning up in the pages of Sounds.

Ollie who worked in Discovery Records in Stratford referred to them as Depeche Toad, which was amusing; and Photographic on the Some Bizarre Album seemed like a fairly decent impersonation of Cabaret Voltaire, albeit without any of the funny noises which made Cabaret Voltaire interesting; and yet somehow there was a pervasive wholesome quality about them, something guileless, something a bit youth club with synths set up on the ping-pong table. This quality, whatever it was, lingered, rendering subsequent transgressions inherently comical, deeds effortfully undertaken as part of a futile effort to shake off the image, like kids with their first ciggies, lighting the wrong end and taking theatrical drags as though cameras might be running; and then there was the time they found those special sex clothes in that box at the back of dad's wardrobe, and then with the tatts and the arm candy...

I'm sure it was all real, but nevertheless, that's how it looked to me, and how it still looks despite everything. Even a few legitimately great songs - Two Minute Warning, Never Let Me Down Again, Enjoy the Silence, and probably a couple of others - can't quite shift the stench of pop, crisps, and jumpers knitted by your nan, which I propose even whilst holding that Dave Gahan is blessed with a genuinely powerful voice. I'm not even sure what it is - the ballsachingly appalling lyrics, Martin Gore's hair - which doubtless ensured that his dinner money never once saw the inside of the school canteen cash register, the plinky-plonky quality of certain songs, or something else, some emergent property resulting from a combination of indelibly wholesome factors.

Still, it was a free ticket for a film showing for one night only, so I wasn't going to say no, despite my reservations. I anticipated a documentary accounting for their transformation from Herman's Hermits into SPK and then ultimately into U2, but thankfully it was better than that. Spirits in the Forest has six Depeche Mode fans from across the globe tell their stories, interspersed with footage of a predictably massive concert in Berlin. It works because the fans, or at least these fans, are more interesting than the band, so they may as well be Lieutenant Pigeon obsessives for all the difference it makes; and I particularly enjoyed the story of DMK, a tribute act featuring a father and his two kids playing Depeche Mode covers on toy instruments. Actually, I think I liked them more than I liked the main feature.

The live footage, which punctuates the progress of our six fans as we follow them to the gig, fails to shed any light on the mystery of Depeche Mode, at least for me. What subtle qualities their less comical songs may have is lost once blasted out on a scale more suited to some Laibach parody, and Martin Gore standing around like a lemon with a guitar fails to make much difference to anything, and then we come to Dave Gahan, now a troubling hybrid of David Niven and John Waters whose face is too big for his head. His arms and legs are similarly too long for his body, which his weird Jagger impersonations only accentuate meaning that he now vaguely resembles one of those things from Ice Age. I don't understand why you would go to see this band, or why you would go to see them in a stadium the size of the Grand Canyon; but then I found it nevertheless watchable with a couple of decent tunes, despite it being Depeche Mode, so if that's your bag, I've no doubt that Spirits in the Forest must seem amazing.

Brothers of the Sonic Cloth (2015)

I've been waiting for the musical volcano of Tad Doyle to once more spew forth its lava, raining molten death upon surrounding villages for some time, at least since the Hog Molly album whenever that was, and certainly since that wonderful decade when a new Tad album seemed like a fairly regular thing; and the reason for such anticipation is that Tad were pretty much the greatest rock band of all time.

The lad has apparently spent the intervening years running his Witch Ape studio up in Seattle, generally avoiding music business headaches, and occasionally titting about with his own ditties. Eventually he decided this material justified getting a band together, and so he did, and here's the album.

I'm a bit out of the loop with all the musical subgenres into which everything has split of late, but then I've reached that age past which all sense of chronology goes out the window, by which I'd guess probably a couple of years have passed since the members of Tad all went their separate ways when actually that was 1999, which was fucking ages ago. Oh well.

One of the subgenres into which metal has split is sludge metal, or maybe I mean doom metal. You were probably all sick of it years ago, but I never saw the memo. Lieutenant Pigeon may already have enjoyed a sludge comeback for all that anyone has bothered to keep me informed. Anyway, the first Brothers of the Sonic Cloth album is something along these lines so I gather, meaning it's quite different to the music of Tad in certain respects, same ballpark maybe but a different game. In fact, most of Tad's output sounds quite light-hearted and breezy compared to this. To my ears - with all of their limited fat old man points of reference - I'm reminded of bits of Black Sabbath, maybe Cop-era Swans with more of a tune, and elements of Ramleh, Skullflower or whoever. The guitar represents a great wall of grinding neolithic pain rolling over its audience at glacial speed with the bass like some growling animal prowling around out there somewhere; and the drums just fucking pound. The raw force definitely reminds me of the Swans, but Tad - or Thomas Doyle if you prefer - always had so much more going on than just bludgeoning noise. As with his earlier endeavours, there's some serious if understated melody underscoring this river of lava, invoking that uniquely wounded quality which characterises the man's finest work, serving to throw the whole into sharp relief as something more than just the sound of stars undergoing gravitational collapse but with guitars - if you'll pardon what is probably a fucking ludicrous and possibly overused simile.

It's good to have this guy back, and certainly not wishing to diminish the mighty force of Peggy Doyle or Dave French, but this is one absolute fucker of a comeback album - if such a term is quite appropriate - and clear evidence of why Mr. Doyle remains one of the most astonishing music artists of our time.

Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure (1973)

Arguing against the sort of cultural relativism by which an episode of  She-Ra: Princess of Power may be considered equal to anything ever committed to celluloid by Stanley Kubrick, my mother suggested that for any sentiment or observation one may care to share, there will be better and worse ways by which to express it, and in certain cases, a single optimum way. She used this argument to support her belief that certain ideas discussed in Shakespeare cannot be found discussed with such eloquence anywhere else and thus represent the highest form of the art regardless of whether or not you happen to like Shakespeare. Having finally recovered from deep feelings of inadequacy inspired by what such a system of values may say about my beloved collection of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic DVDs, I have come to realise that she's probably right. This, I would suggest, means that For Your Pleasure really is one of the greatest rock albums ever recorded, and if not the greatest then it's at least top two - the other one being either 8-Way Santa or Infrared Riding Hood - never could quite decide between those two.

I know the fucker's now over forty years old, but it still has the sharp edge of something recorded yesterday, possibly through Roxy Music having sort of stepped sideways and removed themselves from anything that could be identified as a rock continuum. They were of course lumped in with glam rock - some might say epitomised the form - but I never could quite square what they did with all those Double Diamond guzzling bricklayers wearing their birds' green eye-shadow and burping woah woah woah I'm back on Top of the Pops. Roxy Music felt more like pop art, but pop art done properly with style and attention to detail, as differentiated from all that commodified crap Andy Warhol used to splash around with all the choreography of a chimp's tea party. Style, yes - there was some sort of art deco thing going on here; not so much style over content as style as content. Listen closely and most of the tracks on For Your Pleasure resemble compositions more than songs in the traditional sense, particularly the extended freak outs vaguely invoking Pink Floyd indulgence but sharper and colder in form, more like the work of Neu or Faust or one of the German groups. Probably more than anyone who came before, Roxy Music were making art, something a million miles from the sweaty boozepit in which all the usual old hairies were trudging out their fuzz-metal version of Robert Johnson. Some of it sounds so mannered that it made even David Bowie at his most cross-eyed sound like Lieutenant Pigeon. This was the opposite of ELO.

I dislike the cultural retrofetishisation of the 1970s not least because it keeps bringing back the turds it took us a whole fucking decade to mash around the s-bend with a sink splodger. It giggles and expects us to listen to the Rubettes on the grounds of it being funny how they all wore those matching suits and caps, and it washes over just how different Roxy Music were to everything else at the time; and that without them - even more so than Bowie - there would have been no Adam & the Ants, Siouxsie & the Banshees, any of that angular postpunk racket, cold wave or whatever the boutique collectors' labels are calling it this month.

For Your Pleasure is as good as it will ever get.